Randomness and Replayability
Quotes from famous game designers and others.

I'm pretty damn sick and tired of all the patterns necessary to beat video games. I want a challenge, not a memory exercise. I got enough of that in history class back in school.

Joe Santulli from a Digital Press article

Many game designers think that replayability means adding a multiplayer feature.

Duane Alan Hahn

I could never understand the whole point of playing patterns. If all you're doing is memorizing a bunch of moves, why bother. That's not "playing", there's no skill involved. Might as well set up a machine or something to input the patterns for you and just sit back and watch for what it accomplishes.

Robert Klace

I was disappointed when I found out that Pac-Man had patterns you could learn. I wanted the ghosts to have a bit of randomness thrown in. They would still have their personalities, but you wouldn't be able to count on some stupid pattern to win. You'd actually have to play the game. Sure, the patterns can be ignored, but millions of people were trained that gaming was more about learning 'dance steps' and less about on-the-spot decision making and pure fun.

The public became used to games that were devoid of randomness where everything from bonus items to enemies were always in the same place. Level bosses with predetermined patterns to learn became the norm. Most people were brainwashed into believing that all games were supposed to be one-time static action puzzles to solve or a string of 'dance steps' to learn. It's as if they forgot all of those great board games they used to play that were full of randomness and replayability.

The reason I became interested in video games was because of all of the amazing possibilities. A computer is ideal for creating replayable games. If you want randomness, what could be better than a computer? You can go beyond anything that is possible with a board game, but that awesome potential is usually ignored or scoffingly dismissed.

Duane Alan Hahn

Although most games that have zero replay value are detestable, you can't have raw, unbridled randomness either since your games would be unplayable. Luckily, with Controlled Randomness, you can create replayable games while maintaining control. Controlled Randomness can help you make wonderful games where everything is where it should be, but players will have a fresh experience every time they play. There are many ways to use Controlled Randomness and there's no excuse not to use it with all of the resources we have today. It's just lazy programming if you don't.

Duane Alan Hahn

Some people say that games with Controlled Randomness don't really contain randomness because the positions have been predetermined. That makes no sense because it's common knowledge that card and dice games contain randomness and the number of cards and sides of each die have been predetermined. If you think of Controlled Randomness in that way, there should be no argument. The positions are still randomly selected from a list of possible choices, so predetermination does not cancel out randomness. Predetermination is an attempt to harness an awesome power for the sake of playability. With pure randomness, there is no playability and without Controlled Randomness, there is no replayability.

Duane Alan Hahn

In principle, any game should be replayable. If you went down to the toy store, bought a board game in a box for twenty or thirty dollars, and then came home to discover that you could only play it once, you would be rightfully wrathful. Yet, this happens fairly frequently with computer games, and our customers are more or less resigned to it. Replayability, however, is no accident: it's something we as designers can build in on purpose … if we want to.

Ernest Adams from the article Replayability, Part One: Narrative

I think a great example of the contrast in game design is Star Raiders vs. Wing Commander and all derivatives thereafter. Star Raiders randomizes the ships when you start out. Wing Commander and the like are scripted games. They have missions. Certain events within the missions must occur the same every time. As such, it limits replayability. It's just an exercise in beating a fixed scenario like the movie Groundhog Day where it's deja vu again and again.

I'm not saying some of those kinds of games can't be fun, but they don't hold your attention forever. For instance, Galaga is a great game but there is a lot hardcoded in it. I really like Rastan but everything that comes at you is predetermined. River Raid's only saving grace is that it goes on pretty much forever, and you can hack the game to start at a deeper level, almost simulating randomness. But today, most games are designed as disposable entertainment.

This is what the game industry wants, and it is what the consumer has already wholeheartedly accepted in the name of cinematic gaming. But I think something is lost along the way.

Glenn Saunders

Pinball is a good example of what makes a great game—a mixture of luck and skill. That's a very critical aspect. In the long run a more-skilled player will do better, but in the short run anyone should be able to win. There should be some randomness, which offer challenges over the game. When you get to games like Pac-Man or Mortal Kombat where there's a documentable sequence that you can execute to succeed, to me that's totally antithetical to what a game should be.

Howard Scott Warshaw from a Digital Press interview

The old Choose Your Own Adventure books had many paths and around 40 different endings which is 39 more than most computer games. Almost every type of computer game would be improved if it had more choices and had alternate endings. More randomly placed objects, rooms, characters, bonus items, bonus areas, and so on wouldn't hurt either.

Duane Alan Hahn

One of my best tricks is to make every damn possible thing random. If something repeats (for example if your character looks left and right) don't make it ping-pong in perfect timing like a metronome. Always slip in randomness so that something that does repeat never looks the same twice. Nothing in your game should move to a "beat."

Dave Perry

Next Generation Magazine, January 1997

Most video games are like toilet paper. Buy a game, use it once, then flush it. These Toilet Paper Games have zero replayability. From platform games to full-motion video games, it's been basically the same thing since the mid 1980s. Even in the early 1980s, Activision and other companies had the nasty habit of making many Atari 2600 games where everything was in the same place every time. Luckily, companies such as Atari and Imagic made some pretty good replayable games, so things weren't so bad, at least for a while.

Duane Alan Hahn

A lot of Toilet Paper Games seem like they are made by frustrated filmmaker wanna-bes. You can forget about randomness and replayability; they don't even want to make games. They want to make barely interactive films that are stuffed full of cut scenes. The more they make you just sit there and watch, the more they like it.

Duane Alan Hahn

I used the random object placement in level 3 for variety. I didn't want it to be like a puzzle, where once you've solved it, it's not very interesting to do it again, and I wanted to avoid that. The bat was also added as a confusion factor, to move objects around a bit, so that the game wasn't too predictable. (I did make a mistake in my random object placement code, and there is a 1 in 18 chance that the yellow key will start out in the yellow castle, making the game unwinnable. This only happens in level 3.)

As you may gather from the above, I think that randomness in a game is very strong medicine, and must be very carefully controlled.

Warren Robinett from a Good Deal Games interview

I'm glad Tetris wasn't created like so many other games because the blocks would always fall in the same order and you wouldn't be able to turn them. There would be only one way you could finish a level and you'd have to play it over and over again until you got it right.

Duane Alan Hahn

Back to Top